The Daily Climate: "Climate change is a major evil"

by Emily Gertz · 2009-01-05 10:28:00 UTC
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Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that. Nor will it.

-- Bruce Sterling, Jan. 2009

Join in one of the web's most thoughtful conversations about the present and possible futures. It's going on right now: the annual dialogue between author, journalist, editor, and critic Bruce Sterling, and cultural strategist, social commentator, web strategist, and recent guest blogger at Stop Global Warming, Jon Lebkowsky.

Bruce is one of my favorite writers. He's best known as the author of several visionary near-future science fiction novels, including Heavy Weather (1995), an entertaining tale of political corruption, climate crisis, killer tornados, and really cool tech, in America 2031.

Five years later, Bruce wrote The Viridian Manifesto and begin a "Viridian design movement" which inspired me, and many colleagues to look for original and creative ways to solve problems like global warming. Nine years (and about 500 emails) later, we're still searching. Although it's clearer every day that many of the answers to climate change and other problems are out there, the barriers to change still tower above our tender noggins, as Bruce observes:

The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't yet have the battalions.

Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion.

None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast. This is a frank recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.

Read, think, and add your two cents, between now and mid-January.

Image: Hurricane Katrina, just before making landfall in Louisiana, August 2005. Source: NASA Earth Observatory.

Emily Gertz
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